Children are hard-wired to be imaginative

It's obvious that children are imaginative. Toy dolls and stuffed animals talk, eat food and in every other way are real to the child. Toy cars and trucks drive and make noises. Pretending to be a pirate or princess, an explorer or anyone at all, name it, it's all real to the child. And it should be.

Youth is a beautiful state of mind that brims with imagination, vigor, a sense of courage and an appetite for adventure. But just because the body ages, our sense of wonder and imagination doesn't abandon us; we abandon it, and that's a dangerous place adults go both for themselves and relative to children. When this happens, the adult loses touch with a child's imagination, and the danger for the child is to think that certain things they powerfully believe in are unacceptable in the adult world, and this isolates the child.

Reading children's books together is an excellent way to foster a child's imagination while simultaneously reminding the adult what it is to have a child's imagination. This enables the adult to remain tied to the child and ultimately connected to the child inside us all. That's what you'll find in the books mentioned below, and that's important stuff.

Young Matthias is an illegal third-born, and the Population Police are gaining power. That means all illegal third-borns are in even greater danger than before. Food supplies are dangerously low, and the Population Police have stepped up their violent attacks on the rebels.

Suddenly Matthias is caught in the middle. While trying to save the lives of his friends, Matthias is accidentally swept into the world of the Population Police, where he is considered to be an attribute to the organization. Surrounded by his most feared enemies, Matthias doesn't know whom he can trust. Then Matthias encounters Nina, another illegal third-born, who enlists his help in overthrowing the Population Police. Can they succeed against the evil bureaucracy?

Deeply thought provoking on numerous levels, this spellbinding book is about the courage of people faced with evil and how they can make a difference.

In this magical, wordless picture book, a lonely girl draws a door on her bedroom wall with her red marker. She opens the door and walks through it into a magical world brimming with beauty, adventure and danger. Creating different modes of transportation with her marker, she travels from place to place. When she at last encounters evil, her bravery and kindness are ultimately rewarded in ways she couldn't have imagined.

An extraordinary, imaginative tale is beautifully told through the illustrations of Becker, making "Journey" a rich and wonderful book.

"The First Drawing" written and illustrated by Mordicai Gerstein, Little, Brown, 2013, 40 pages, $17 hardcover.

Read aloud: age 4 and older.

Read yourself: ages 7 - 8.

Caldecott Medalist Gerstein has created a thought-provoking, inspiring story about the invention of drawing. Inspired by the world-famous Chauvet Cave drawings made more than 30,000 years ago, Gerstein creates his story through the eyes of an 8-year-old boy who, frustrated that no one could see what he saw, was the first human to pick up a burnt stick from the fire and draw on the walls of the family cave.

Highly imaginative, "The First Drawing" excels in every regard.

Nationally syndicated, Kendal Rautzhan writes and lectures on children's literature. She can be reached at her website: www.greatestbooksforkids.com.